And from the hillside came through the dawn the first sudden rattle of musketry.
Louis wiped the sweat from his forehead with his frayed scarlet cuff, and leant a moment breathless against the gun which he had been helping to drag nearer to the edge of the copse. He had no cause to complain of cold now. “How many more rounds?” he asked.
Panting, begrimed, blood-stained, the four men at the gun looked at him. “Three,” said the eldest solemnly, and the voice of Toussaint Lelièvre added sharply: “Monsieur le Vicomte, you are wounded!”
Louis shrugged his shoulders, and glanced down carelessly at the gash above his knee, whence the blood was coursing unheeded into his high boot. “Three? Carefully then, mes enfants. . . .”
In front, between them and Savenay, could be seen a blue and white mass, advancing slowly but steadily, and firing as it came. A little behind it, to the left, almost motionless, was visible a body of horsemen—the hussars of Westermann, the man who knew no pity. The gun roared. Louis looked a moment longer through the twigs, and then, catching up a musket, knelt down again on the dead leaves and went on firing.
The leaden sky, the cold rain, the position of the gun on the edge of a wood, all seemed a replica of three hours ago. Yet all was changed. The day was lost, and the wood was not the same. When first the Vendeans attacked with the fury of despair, they had driven in the outposts of the château of Touchelais, but afterwards they had been slowly forced back on to the Bois des Amourettes, where Marigny’s battery had checked for a time Marceau’s onset. In their corner of the wood Louis’ men and Des Nouhes’ Angevins, ravaged by the grape-shot, fell, re-formed, fell faster. At last it was impossible to hold the wood any longer. Even then they saved the guns.
And then they were down in Savenay, and Savenay was a nightmare—a repetition of the unspeakable carnage of Le Mans. By every inlet flooded through the united columns of Marceau and Kléber, Tilly and Canuel. And first Louis was in the square by the church, always with the guns, holding a street full of hussars in check. Then, in some inexplicable fashion, a torrent of fugitives tore both him and Des Nouhes away from their men, and they were flung to the other side of the square, right under the hoofs of a squadron of dragoons who came like a whirlwind out of another street. Des Nouhes was sabred at Saint-Ermay’s side, and in a doorway Louis saw a boy of fourteen, Armand de Beaurepaire, cut to pieces with the Comte, his grandfather, because he would not surrender. But death would none of him—only a dragoon slashed at him as he struggled to rise. After that he had tried to work his way back across the tossing square to the guns, inwardly thanking God that, at least, the women and children were gone—he could not bear to see that again. . . . He caught sight of a fresh stream of fugitives. Half of them were women. From the sleeve of one of them, quite young, and by her face of gentle birth, protruded a dripping stump. . . . And a red fury banished his frozen calm. At the tail of the press was Marigny, on horseback, in his hand the white standard Madame de Lescure had once embroidered for him. Louis had wrestled through to him, had caught at his bridle and cried in a breaking voice that there were still women in the town, and Marigny, death in his face, had replied that he was trying to get them out by the Guérande road. . . . And not long after that, profiting by the diversion caused by Fleuriot and Donnissan, who, disdaining to fly, had opened a passage back into Savenay with the bayonet, they had succeeded in getting the two guns out of the shambles, along the road. More nightmare scenes. . . .
Then, with but one gun, he was here in the wood of Blanche-Couronne, with Marigny, four times that day repulsed by the death he sought, and old Donnissan, and Fleuriot, and a few score more, holding it in a last desperate effort to protect the rout, to postpone, if only for half an hour, the ultimate slaughter. But five minutes more would see the end. . . .
Less, perhaps. There was a stir along the border of the wood to his right, wild voices, men scrambling to the saddle, running. And Louis’ musket snapped uselessly—the cartridges were too wet. He threw it down and drew his sword.